International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (IJTSRD)
Volume 4 Issue 5, July-August 2020 Available Online: www.ijtsrd.com e-ISSN: 2456 – 6470
Registering Resistance: Ambiguity of the Native Narratorial
Voice and the Colonial Folklorist in Nineteenth Century India
Arijit Goswami
Assistant Professor (West Bengal Education Service), Department of English,
Gorubathan Government College, Lower Fagu Tea Garden, West Bengal, India
ABSTRACT
Folk literature has always remained the veritable connection between the
reader and the heritage of the land, orally transmitted from one generation to
the other. With the advent of the colonisers from Europe came the colonial
trappings of hegemonic, patriarchal structure which aimed at the socioeconomic aggrandizement of the colonising countries at the cost of the
colonised ones. They disguised their administrative goals in the borrowed
garbs of rationality and knowledge. The proposed paper would try to
understand the intentions of the colonisers and analyse the resistance
exhibited by the colonised narrators in the domain of folk literature in
nineteenth century India.
How to cite this paper: Arijit Goswami
"Registering Resistance: Ambiguity of the
Native Narratorial Voice and the Colonial
Folklorist in Nineteenth Century India"
Published
in
International Journal
of Trend in Scientific
Research
and
Development
(ijtsrd), ISSN: 24566470, Volume-4 |
IJTSRD33070
Issue-5,
August
2020,
pp.1107-1110,
URL:
www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd33070.pdf
KEYWORDS: Folktales, Colonialism, Narratorial resistance
INTRODUCTION
The mission of Colonialism has always been to alter the
status quo of the colonised state to such a degree that the
common people's attitude towards their own traditions
changed drastically. The hegemonic patriarchy that the
colonisers represented tried to subjugate the customs of the
colonised and portrayed a better version of their indigenous
history by influencing and altering the same. Colonialism
affected the outlook of the colonies in nearly every sphere of
life, and folk-life was no exception. The subversion of the
native vision led to two affects - first was of a rejection of
their own way of life and the second was of acceptance and
pride in the heritage of the coloniser. The inculcation of the
idea of subversion was achieved through the neo-education
system put into force by the colonisers in the early
nineteenth century, which lead to a hybrid society which
contained values from both of the colonizer and the
colonized.
Folklore, an integral part of the pre-colonial society, was an
inherent part of the theory and praxis of the entire society
including the intellectuals and masses. The problem was that
the folk-literature was seldom acknowledged as a pure form
of literature. It was generally considered as inappropriate to
accord a recognition to folk literature within the gamut of
mainstream literature, then in vogue. The problem was
genuine as folk-texts were oral in nature and hence
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embodied a sense of independence and fluidity that can be
rarely achieved by mainstream literature. The fluidity of
folk-literature paved the way of its recognition as a method
of resistance against the colonisers. The British understood
the immense energy that folk-literature embodied and thus
envisaged to get them printed. When a folk-text is printed, its
features and language gets bounded within the boundary of
hegemonic literary canon, and thereby looses the liveliness
of performance, which is a basic feature of folk-lore. The
mainstream literature having strict conventions of its own
expressed through literary lingua and controlled by the
socio-politico-economic concerns of the proto-colonised
clearly lacks the voice of spontaneity, vibrancy of the folktales. In a way the folk-tales represent the imaginative
realism of the common people who existed beyond the realm
of Macaulayian India. It is clear that the folk-literature has no
distinct time-frame, as they are orally transmitted from a
generation to the next and hence the changes in version
remains a common feature. Before the advent of print and
other media, the human voice was the only communicative
technology. In pre-print era, oral transmission was the main
feature which separated folk literature from the mainstream
literature. Once printed, an oral text was canonized and it
lost all the features that proved its vibrancy and evolutionary
existence.
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Colonial interest in Folktales
The colonial enterprise always endeavoured to use the
tradition of the colonised and subvert it for strengthening
their cultural domination through the distilled and deviated
form of long-existent norms and praxis; with India the status
was no different. The British wanted to control the reading
practices of the natives by directing what the printed canon
in early part of the nineteenth century. In 1818, Mountstuart
Elphinstones, who was to later become the Governor of
Bombay, submitted a report on the literate practice of the
colony:
"...Books are scarce, and the common ones probably illchosen; but there exist in the Hindu languages many tales
and fables that would be generally read, and that would
circulate sound morals. There must be religious books
tending more directly to the same end. If many of these are
printed and distributed gratuitously, the effect would
without doubt, be great and beneficial. It would however be
indispensible that they should be purely Hindu. We might
silently omit all precepts of questionable morality, but the
slightest infusion of religious controversy would secure the
failure of the design." (Naregal: 2001:151).
The colonised and the colonisers involved themselves in
discourses – each redefining the Other by its own unique
experiences. The heterogeneous polyphony within these
experiences paved way for the collection, systematic edition
through planned exclusion of so called spurious elements
and dissemination through the printed form of a sort of
filtered folklore in the late nineteenth century India,
especially in the emergent native society which had accepted
the British notions of "rationality" and "enlightenment".
Evidently, both the coloniser and the colonised were
subverted by each other - both were deciphered, re-encoded
and re-interpreted, while the colonial narratives often
attempted (and mostly failed) to suppress these voice(s) of
dissent.
The ideals propounded by the Folklore Society (established
in London in 1878) were of enlightened parochialism. Its
journal Folklore voiced the late nineteenth century ideals of
disciplining the ill-taught, under-developed and irrational
oriental colonised through Enlightenment of rational
occidental knowledge. Edward W. Brabooke’s article
in Folklore XII (1901) and Charlotte Burne’s The Handbook of
Folklore (1914) reaffirmed the “empire theory” of folklore,
voiced by E. S. Hartland in his Presidential Address in 1900.
Hartland emphasised the “practical advantages for the
governors, district officers and judges of an enlightened
mother-country in learning through folklore about the
cultures
of
the
native
people
under
their
dominions”(Jobson:1999: p. 332). Temple does not delude
himself about the reason for amassing his collection. For
him, this “will enhance our influence over the natives and
render our intercourse with them more easy and
interesting.” (Morrison: 1984: p.150). He was the
distinguished Victorian who would subsequently give
lectures on Anthropology in Cambridge in 1904. Temple
surely affirmed to his “White Man’s Burden” and when
premier educationists of post-renaissance Bengal like Rev.
Lal Behari Day collected Bangla folktales as a response to
Temple’s request, he acknowledged the colonial
paradigmatic discourse of control, but not unilateral
subjugation.
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Credit for the first few collections of Bengali folk literature
goes to these people. Sir George issued folktale collections
Grierson in 1873 and Reverend Lal Behari Day in 1883. The
advent of the twentieth century saw the establishment of
folklore societies in various parts of the world and the
publication of a number of journals devoted to folklore
studies. This created a viable organizational structure for
research and lent new impetus to the collection of folk
literature. In Bengal, interestingly enough, this effort was led
mainly by the English-educated citizenry of Calcutta, whom
the British had intended to make their own image in taste, in
opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
Folklore as a device of colonisation
The British regime in India aimed at the exploration of the
cultural heritage of the land in order to collect, translate,
understand, formulate and categorise the nation and its
ethos for better administrative control. This sense of
categorisation had its roots in the eighteenth century rise of
rationality and scientific temper throughout Europe. The
economic needs that followed the trade war within nations
of Europe was furthered by the industrial revolution. This
sudden change in socio-economic status -quo in the west
prompted the intense furthering of the colonial enterprise to
maintain the growth pattern back home. The difference
between the oriental life and belief with the occidental was
used to fuel the colonial hearth of superiority and the
agendum of 'noble' appropriation of the so-called irrational
masses into the 'modern' world of rationality and science.
Thus, the whole affair needed the deciphering of the minute
details of life in the Indian subcontinent and for that they
made the language policy and education policy, through
which they envisaged to shape and fit different Indian
languages into a single framework, in a way to streamline
the varied and vast culture of India. British colonial officials
started to collect Indian Folklore texts, mainly folktales from
local story tellers from the middle of the nineteenth century.
It is interesting to note that it happened exactly at the same
time when similar projects had taken place in Western
countries.
The fact that India was a colony and the British were here on
a colonial enterprise thus affected the Indian folklore study
and the colonial collectors’ perspective. The British
administrative personnel and Christian missionaries acted as
links between Western civilization and the elite of the Indian
sub-continent.. The spirit of nationalism and independence
in India inspired some of the Indian elites to search for their
heritage and cultural roots in order to create new avenues of
cultural revival, one manifestation of which was the reemergence of folk literature in the domain of the neoeducated masses. The colonisers used folklore to approach
their subjects; while nationalists used it to revive the longlost national identity to fight colonial power. Thus, there was
a difference between the nature and tone of the collections
by colonial and Indian collectors. According to Naithani, the
images of India were “usually unromantic” in the colonial
collections (Naithani: 2006: 54), while the motivated Indian
collector and narrator's rendition was “not a vague and
romantic loss of tradition but the historical and cultural
transition within a colonized society” (Naithani: 2006: 48).
Seminal Works of the coloniser folklorists
Richard Carnac Temple (1850-1931) was one of the
distinguished “administrator-scholar[s]” of colonial India
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and was the premier folklorist of his generation. He was
born in India, and was the son of a civil servant. He
graduated in Anthropology from Cambridge, and returned to
India in 1871 as a soldier. After his feats of valour in the
Afghan wars of 1878-79, he was appointed as the
Cantonment Magistrate of Ambala in Punjab. He started the
periodical Punjab Notes and Queries - a “miscellany” in 1883
which represented his scholarly interests. He was busy
collecting ballads, stories, and folk-legends for his book on
the legends of Punjab, the first volume of which would be
published in the very next year as Legends of the Panjab. Vol.
1 ( 1884) which was followed by two more volumes in 1885
and 1900 respectively. He also co-edited with Flora Anne
Steel, the wife of a British civil servant, the tales of Punjab
and Kashmir in Wide Awake Stories(1884). He was also the
co-editor of Indian Antiquary from 1884.
Mary Frere, the daughter of Sir Bartle Edward Frere - the
Governor of Bombay published the Old Deccan Days, or
Hindoo Fairy Legends Current in Southern India in 1868. The
narrative source of Mary Frere's folktales was Anna Liberata
de Souza, a Catholic convert from a Lingayat family of
Deccan. Mary would take notes as Anna sat cross-legged, a
typical Indian custom of centuries, followed by generations
of folk performers, and narrated her tales. These would
eventually be edited, expunged in accordance to the taste of
the domineering patriarchal and hegemonic occidental
rationalistic gaze and published as the first colonial
compilation of “Indian” folktales. G. H. Damant serialised
his Bengali Folktales from Dinajpur in the Indian Antiquary
from 1872. Indian Fairy Tales was published in 1879 by Malve
S. H. Stokes, the daughter of the Celtic scholar Whitley
Stokes. The narrative source of her folktale collection were
native ayahs in Calcutta and Simla, from a manservant.
Thomas William Rhys-David’s translated Jataka tales and in
1880 published Buddhist Birth Stories. Rev. Charles
Swynnerton published The Adventures of the Panjab Hero
Raja Rasalu and Other Folk Tales of the Panjab in 1884 ; Rev.
J. Hinton Knowles’ A Dictionary of Kashmiri Proverbs and
Sayings and Sir George Grierson’s A Bihar Peasant Life were
published in 1885. In 1886 were published Temple’s A
Dictionary of Hindustani Proverbs and Knowles’ Folktales of
Kashmir. Mrs. Georgiana Kingscote, along with the help of
Natesa Shastri published Tales of the Sun or Folklore of
Southern India in 1890. Campbell published the Santal Folk
Tales in 1891 while Swynnerton’s Indian Night
Entertainments (1892) was next in print. William Crooke
collaborated with Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and published
An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of India
in 1894. Crooke was a prolific writer and editor, noteworthy
among his written, edited and prefaced works are The
Talking Thrush, and Other Tales from India (1899), Folktales
from the Indus Valley (1902), Things Indian (1906), Hatim
Tales (1928) and Kashmiri Stories and Songs ( prefaced by
Crooke: ‘On the Antiquities in the Stories’).
Dilemma of the colonial folklorists: resistance of the
'native' narratorial voice
The folklorists of colonial administrative set-up or European
origin supporting the colonising campaign was at an unease
while dealing with the collection, narration, and eventual
translation followed by printing of the orally transmitted
folktales of the Indian sub-continent. Their work was
complex as they were administrators on the one-hand and
folklorists on the other. They did not have the freedom of
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Orientalists and Indologists working from the comfort of
their known home-space like Max Müller who was able to
support his vocation in France: studying Sanskrit from
Eugène Burnouf and studying texts from the East India
Company's collection in London or Monier Williams
pursuing his philosophical quest at Haileybury and Oxford.
The colonial folklorists like Damant, Crooke and Temple
were “busy Indian official[s]” (as Temple described himself)
pursuing the 'native' narrators - unknown troubadours and
rural bards in a foreign land to collect their stories in order
to re-design them for the furtherance of the colonial
enterprise in India.
These narrators were of a rural background with little
knowledge of the canonical literature and the official
language status. They were the followers of a living tradition
of folklore which was literature and performance at the same
point of time. They were the carriers of a proto-history that
had travelled for centuries in the Indian heritage and
remained an alternative to the royal and mainstream Indian
literature. The administrator-scholars had a certain degree
of repugnance and disgust for these narrators as Temple
goes on to elaborate in the Preface to his Legends, “[M]any as
the vices and faults of these people are . . . [t]he bhât, the
mârâsî, the bharâîn, the jogí, the faqîr and all of that ilk are in
truth but a sorry set of drunkards as a rule – tobacco, opium
and a little food sufficing for their daily wants, and I have
found out that a small payment, say one or two rupees for
each separate song, and their keep in food and an abundance
of their favourite drugs while employed, has amply satisfied
them, and in some cases have been inducement sufficient to
send other of their brethren to me" (Legends of the Panjab.
Vol. 1, page x). Temple’s efforts in extracting stories from
these bards was the furtherance of the colonial game - a
discourse of extraction and control. Temple often uses
imagery and metaphor that betrays his vocation as a scholar
and enforces his administrative nature and prowess. His
“catching of bards” was equivalent to the Foucauldian idea of
disciplining through Knowledge. He was the lord of the land,
the judge of the land and its people who decided whether
any rural bard was “a most disreputable rascal”. (Legends of
the Panjab. Vol. 1, page viii)or "very ignorant and often
stupid to boot” (Legends of the Panjab. Vol. 1, page xi). He
failed to be a proper collector of folklores and became a
prejudiced commentator, at times:"If you know how to
recognize them when you see them, and catch them when
you have lighted on them, you will find bards still wandering
over the countryside by the score, so the harvest to be
gathered is a very large one." (Legends of the Panjab. Vol. 1,
page vii)
The actual process employed by Temple for collection of folk
literature proved his ambivalent situation: the songs and
tales were collected from the rural folk artists or bards by
Temple’s munshi Chaina Mal in Punjabi which were
translated by the munshi in Persian. Temple would later
transliterate the Persian translation of the native tales in the
Roman script and then translate them into English. This
system thus marginalised the originality of the bard and his
or her explanations were overlooked giving ways to a
distilled version of the ballads or the tales The native bards
had rudimentary knowledge of Persian –the language of
Mughal court elites while both Chaina Mal's and Temple's
proficiency in native Punjabi seems to be a questionable
matter. This intricate linguistic exchange was hence
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pervaded by a sense of miscomprehension and doubt, an
incessant latent fear of slippage and chaos. This in many
ways reflects the pervasive ambivalence in anthropological
narratives born out of colonial encounters (Talak Asad
1973). The story-tellers or narrators and the colonised
middle-men like Chaina Mal blind acceptance of the
superiority of the coloniser folklorists who were also hugely
empowered colonial administrators was often questionable.
This fact was often left unrecognised by the folklorists
themselves who self-consciously, or unknowingly, affirmed
their gaze to be omniscient. In ‘Colonial Histories and Native
Informants’, Nicholas B. Dirks depicts the insularity of people
towards Colin Mackenzie and his assistants who were on a
mission to collect data in various parts of South India in
1820-1821:"Knowledge was never imparted without
suspicion and the direct invocation of some British authority.
When British authority was not absolute . . . there were
frequent difficulties "(p. 297)
There was mutual mistrust which led to a complex colonial
game-play of power and resistance amply explained by
David Kopf in his Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance:
The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773- 1835: "To
appreciate fully the phenomenal Orientalist rediscovery of
the Hindu classical age, it is necessary to isolate those
components of the European Enlightenment that
predisposed the Company servants in that direction. The
intellectual elite that clustered about Hastings after 1770
was classicist rather than 'progressive' in their historical
outlook, cosmopolitan rather than nationalist in their view of
other cultures, and rationalist rather than romantic in their
quest for those 'constant and universal principles' that
express the unity of human nature. " (p. 22)
Ashis Nandy’s analysis of the psychological paradigms
involved in the rise of the Nationalist discourse and the rise
of resistance in the rural areas as well as the urban and
educated intellectuals and artists is evident in ‘The
Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in 'British
India’, (pp.1-63). Nandy relates the insularity of the narrator
and the ambivalence of relation between the coloniser
folklorist and narrator as the “new definition of masculinity
and normality”. He associates the acute opposition between
the two important elements of folk-literature: the source and
the collector and interpreter as an acute disjunction of 'the
necessarily androgynous cultural archetypes of South Asia
and the gendered identities of the Victorian Imperial
discourse'. This led to the perception of the natives as
roguish, flippant, feminine, childlike, irrational – who needed
rational tuning and education to achieve the status of being
culturally tamed through the Western, modern and/ or
Christian hermeneutical devices in order to mature into
adulthood. Thus arose the necessity to the repress the
“unwilling to learn, ungrateful, sinful, savage, unpredictably
violent, disloyal” traits in the native psyche. Nandy posits:
"The colonial ideology handled the problem in two mutually
inconsistent ways. Firstly, it postulated a clear disjunction
between India’s past and its present. The civilized India was
the bygone past; it was dead and 'museumized'. The present
India, the argument went, was only nominally related to its
history... Secondly and paradoxically, the colonial culture
postulated that India’s later degradation was not due to
colonial rule - which, if anything, had improved Indian
culture by fighting against its irrational, oppressive,
retrogressive elements - but due to aspects of the traditional
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Indian culture which in spite of some good points carried the
seeds of India’s later cultural downfall. "(pp: 17-18)
Sadhana Naithani, in her seminal work The Colonizer
Folklorist exposes this inherent ambiguity, this essentially
mutual re-framing, in her study of Temple:"What was the
response of the folktale narrators to Temple's invitations/
commands? Was it the collector's choice that only stories of
saints and mythical heroes were recorded, or is there a
possibility of a judicious narration on the part of the narrator
and of silent censorship on the part of the munshis?"(pp. 114)
Conclusion
The resistance of the native narrator towards the colonial
enterprise of the British folklorists was probably the first
example of popular resistance in the rural heartland of
Indian sub-continent in the literary domain. The relatively
ill-educated common folk of the rural Indian world-order,
even though dependent upon the colonial administrative
order for their meagre living, had registered their protest
against the hegemony of the colonisers even when the
educated class of the urban areas remained insular to anticolonial efforts.
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